Johannes Itten – The founder of colour type theory

The Swiss painter, art theoretician and arts pedagogue Johannes Itten (1888-1967) is considered the founder of colour type theory, that served as the basis for the pioneers of colour consultation, Suzanne Caygill and Carole Jackson.

After he had finished his education as a teacher, he decided to become a painter. He became a student of Adolf Hölzel’s at the Academy of Stuttgart, and he took over Hölzel’s concept of colour contrasts. In 1919, Itten became a teacher at the federal Bauhaus in Weimar. While teaching there and working with students, he developed his colour type theory: he determined that all human beings can be allocated to one of the four different types spring, summer, autumn and winter. While warm tones dominate in spring and autumn, cold tones prevail in summer and winter. Itten considered it natural to use especially a person’s charisma when allocating a type, next to the pigmentation of the skin, hair and eye colour. He also found out in his experiments that his students preferred those colours for painting that also looked best on themselves, and that there are people with a very limited colour range, people with a wide range and all sorts of intermediate stages.

Itten occupied himself intensively with the impact of colours on the human being. He noticed that certain colours and colour cominbations make us feel better than others. Itten allocated certain ”traits” to different colours, e.g. red – heat, blue – cold. Itten’s theory is still applied when planning and furnishing rooms. His twelve-part colour circle doesn’t only contain the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the complimentary colours orange, green and violet, but also different mixture ratios of the colours with each other. Itten doesn’t consider black and white to be colours.

He describes the mutual influence of colours in his seven colour-contrasts:

The colour-as-such contrast

The light-dark contrast

The cold-warm contrast

The complementary contrast

The simultaneous contrast

The quality contrast

The quantity contrast

Johannes Itten’s main book on colour theory is “Art of Colour”, which was published by Urania in 1970.

The Swiss painter, art theoretician and arts pedagogue Johannes Itten (1888-1967) is considered the founder of colour type theory, that served as the basis for the pioneers of colour consultation, Suzanne Caygill and Carole Jackson.

After he had finished his education as a teacher, he decided to become a painter. He became a student of Adolf Hölzel’s at the Academy of Stuttgart, and he took over Hölzel’s concept of colour contrasts. In 1919, Itten became a teacher at the federal Bauhaus in Weimar. While teaching there and working with students, he developed his colour type theory: he determined that all human beings can be allocated to one of the four different types spring, summer, autumn and winter. While warm tones dominate in spring and autumn, cold tones prevail in summer and winter. Itten considered it natural to use especially a person’s charisma when allocating a type, next to the pigmentation of the skin, hair and eye colour. He also found out in his experiments that his students preferred those colours for painting that also looked best on themselves, and that there are people with a very limited colour range, people with a wide range and all sorts of intermediate stages.

Itten occupied himself intensively with the impact of colours on the human being. He noticed that certain colours and colour cominbations make us feel better than others. Itten allocated certain ”traits” to different colours, e.g. red – heat, blue – cold. Itten’s theory is still applied when planning and furnishing rooms. His twelve-part colour circle doesn’t only contain the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the complimentary colours orange, green and violet, but also different mixture ratios of the colours with each other. Itten doesn’t consider black and white to be colours.

He describes the mutual influence of colours in his seven colour-contrasts:

The colour-as-such contrast

The light-dark contrast

The cold-warm contrast

The complementary contrast

The simultaneous contrast

The quality contrast

The quantity contrast

Johannes Itten’s main book on colour theory is “Art of Colour”, which was published by Urania in 1970.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Colour and Image Consulting
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